Pentagon urged to wage counterintelligence warfare against China, Russia

Foreign spy services from China, Russia and elsewhere are engaged in low-level warfare targeting the U.S., and American counterspies should be “operationalized” to defeat them, according to a counterintelligence adviser to the Pentagon.

Shane McNeil, now studying for a doctorate at the Institute of World Politics, said the U.S. government needs to stop using counterintelligence (CI) against foreign spies as a legal compliance back office.

“In today’s battlespace, CI isn’t a support function — it’s a warfighting discipline,” Mr. McNeil, a counterintelligence adviser to the military’s Joint Staff at the Pentagon, stated in an online article.

If the Pentagon wants to survive a war with a nation such as China, “it needs to start thinking of counterintelligence not as a protective layer but as an offensive tool — one capable of achieving real effects,” he stated in the article made public last month.

“In other words, we need to start putting information warheads on enemy spy foreheads,” he wrote.

Foreign intelligence services, including China’s Ministry of State Security and Russia’s GRU military spy agency, are not simply collecting secrets. They are conducting military operations to shape the battlespace in preparation for future crises or conflict.

“Chinese and Russian intelligence campaigns aren’t isolated intrusions; they’re strategic efforts to undermine the United States through sabotage, influence, supply chain compromise and cognitive manipulation,” Mr. McNeil said. “This is unrestricted warfare, and CI needs to respond in kind — not reactively, but offensively.”

The comments from the Pentagon adviser come as Rep. Rick Crawford, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is promoting legislation to require major changes to what he called a “disjointed” American counterintelligence system.

Mr. Crawford, Arkansas Republican, added provisions to the pending intelligence authorization bill that would seek to remedy counterintelligence problems through a new national counterintelligence center, with a new emphasis on offensive, proactive operations.

“We’re always kind of looking for this smoking gun evidence instead of taking proactive steps against those [counterintelligence] threats,” he said.

Counterintelligence among the 18 agencies and departments that make up the U.S. intelligence community are decentralized in individual agencies.

The CIA is charged with conducting counterintelligence abroad, and the FBI is in charge of domestic counterspying. Other agencies have separate counterintelligence departments.

The result, critics say, is gaps that create a favorable environment for foreign spies and agents and limit government efforts to identify, target and neutralize counterintelligence threats.

Poor CIA counterintelligence has been blamed for a major loss of all recruited agents in China beginning in 2010, according to U.S. officials.

China is widely viewed as the most serious foreign intelligence threat. Mark Kelton, former deputy CIA director for counterintelligence, has described Chinese spying as a threat not witnessed in nearly 100 years. “The Chinese intelligence storm impacting the U.S. is a secret assault on America that is without parallel since that mounted by Moscow in the 1930s and ’40s,” he said.

During the Cold War, recruited U.S. agents in the Soviet Union and later Russia, in Eastern Europe and in Cuba were also compromised by ineffective counterintelligence.

Mr. McNeil said his proposal calls for recognizing that adversaries are using their intelligence services to wage low-level warfare in what the military calls the gray zone. As a result, intelligence agencies need to unleash counterintelligence under “wartime discipline and operational authority,” he said.

Counterintelligence is misunderstood as just another intelligence function, he said. But counterspies do not merely collect information. They deny, deceive, manipulate and disrupt foreign spy operations.

Counterspy activities involve a blend of offense activities and operations, defenses against spy penetrations and influencing and exploiting foreign service vulnerabilities, he said.

Mr. McNeil offered several recommendations for improved anti-spy efforts:

• Conduct operations that compromise foreign spies working abroad so that returning to their countries would be untenable and would make defection a better option.

• Use counterintelligence as part of the modern military battle space to conduct operations, activities and investments that will produce both kinetic and non-kinetic effects.

• Identify and then disrupt the recruitment pipelines used by foreign intelligence agencies inside U.S. industry or academia.

• Turn hostile foreign spies’ efforts into double-agent operations. Instead of simply arresting and prosecuting foreign intelligence operatives, counterintelligence officers would first seek to turn them into pro-U.S. agents in place.

• Carry out aggressive influence operations that neutralize Chinese and Russian narratives before they can spread.

Offensive countermeasures also can be applied in targeting cyber-based espionage networks and joining forces with U.S. special operations forces and military operations planners to “execute CI-enabled raids or deny enemy [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance],” Mr. McNeil said.

“This isn’t science fiction — it’s what CI already does on a limited scale,” he said. “The problem is that we treat it as niche and episodic instead of doctrinal and scalable.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have restricted counterintelligence to limited intelligence functions for too long, he said.

Counterintelligence needs to be what the military calls a “fires function” once limited to missiles and artillery and increasingly non-lethal functions such as information warfare and cyberwarfare.

As cyberwarfare became part of military operations, counterintelligence “belongs with the warfighters,” Mr. McNeil said.

“Think of CI as a precision munition against enemy spies, saboteurs and influence agents,” he said. “It needs targeting authority, prioritization frameworks and real-time tasking. In other words, CI needs to be operationalized.”

Mr. McNeil said both the Chinese Ministry of State Security and Russian GRU are already conducting such counterintelligence. Their intelligence operations are fused with overall military strategy.

China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, has stated in military writings that peacetime and wartime activities must be merged and blended with political, economic and technology levers into “a unified effort to weaken the West,” he said.

“If we don’t adapt, we’re bringing a PowerPoint deck to a gunfight,” Mr. McNeil said.

“Modern warfare isn’t just about missiles and tanks — it’s about access, influence and control. And CI is the weapon the United States has underutilized for far too long. It’s time to stop playing defense and start putting info warheads on spy foreheads.”